Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
In this paper, a weighted-neighbor-based cooperation control of multi-quadrotor systems is investigated. A formation tracking problem is treated, where the reference formation trajectory (RFT) is not given a priori. The RFT is only available to some of the quadrotors (i.e. the leaders). In order to attain the fast convergence of the agents, we propose an algorithm to calculate the neighbors’ weights in decentralized way. Then, the weights are used to compose the formation controller. Compared to the widely used average-neighbor-based control method, the proposed control protocol can increase the convergence speed of the cooperation error. Since the formation control is improved in topological scale, the utilization of the proposed algorithms can be extended on any multi-robot systems. We show the improvement of the proposed control protocol by theoretical proof, simulation, and real-time experiments.